So, I get an email from a client complaining that their phone icon is not appearing next to some phone numbers in SharePoint but is appearing for others, to which my immediate response was: “What phone icon?”

After some digging, it turns out that this client recently upgraded to Lync 2010 and one of the features in this version of Lync is “Phone Number Detection” that is implemented as an Add on to Internet Explorer. It merely scans the contents of each web page looking for any text that matches a known phone number format.  If phone numbers are found, it then injects html into the already loaded html that will display a small phone icon next to the number. This added html also enables the ability to click on that icon and have Lync dial the number for you.

All in all, a pretty handy feature except if you are editing content in SharePoint.  You see, Lync has no knowledge of “edit mode” of a SharePoint page so it can’t tell that you are editing content in the page and thus doesn’t know to leave the content alone.  Click to read the full post